The La Caixa Banking Foundation and its Investment Society, Criteria, have approved on Wednesday the return to its historic social headquarters of the Diagonal de Barcelona, located since October 2017 in Palma de Mallorca due to the sovereign process.
In a statement, the Board of Trustees of La Caixa stressed that the agreement reached unanimously “is taken according to the circumstances that caused the temporary transfer of these venues to the city of Palma in 2017.”
The change of headquarters does not imply movement of people or corporate spaces or services, since most employees and work centers have always been located in Barcelona, although it has a relevant symbolic value since it is one more step in the closure of the economic turbulence stage that caused the sovereignty autumn of 2017.
In the most critical phase of the procés, the Board of Trustees of the Foundation advocated to transfer its headquarters to Palma de Mallorca in a “temporary” way to “maintain the interests and normal operation of the entity” before the situation that Catalunya lived.
The return to Barcelona of the Financial Group leading Isidro Fainé joins the one carried out a few weeks ago by the Sabadell Bank last January and for Cementos Molins in late 2024.
“The Foundation” La Caixa “has a firm commitment to its roots, since it was founded as a pension box for old age and savings of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands in 1904 by the Barcelona lawyer Francesc Moragas, with the support of various entities of Catalan civil society,” adds the statement of the entity.
La Caixa is the first business and financial group in Spain. Through the criteria society, directed by Ángel Simón, the entity holds relevant participations in large companies such as Naturgy, Telefónica, ACS, or, the most important, CaixaBank, the largest financial entity in Spain whose registered office moved to València in 2017.
Criteria is the holding that manages the business heritage of the La Caixa Foundation. That is, the company has an investment portfolio in different participated companies that are nurtured by dividends. With them, either generates more investments or injecting funds to the foundation on which it depends and that are destined, in part, to their social and cultural work.
The La Caixa investment arm became last year the great buyer last year by reinforcing their participations in companies listed such as Puig, Colonial, ACS, Telefónica or Naturgy with operations that were around 5,000 million euros.
Source: www.eldiario.es
